Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As the resident libertarian here at GetReligion, I was curious about the flurry of stories about how a progressive Christian group is fighting Ayn Rand. So even though it ran over a week ago, I’m finally getting to this Religion News Service piece on the matter.
Until Kevorkian died today at age 83, the once-famous “Dr. Death” had not crossed my mind in many years.
The other day we looked at the way the media handled a study that showed that Protestants who don’t identify a “born-again” experience had less hippocampal atrophy than Catholics, non-believers and those who do claim a “born-again” experience. I noted that all the headlines I could find highlighted that “born-again” Christians had “smaller brains.”
Yesterday I pointed out the curious manner in which journalists wrote up a study showing that non-believers, Catholics and evangelical Christians have smaller brains than Protestants who don’t claim a “born-again” experience. But at least that study, though having a small sample size, was done by real academics at a real university using typical methods of analysis.
OK, so Religion News Service has a provocative story on a provocative study that I’ve seen in a few papers. But the headlines that are running with the story are curious, to say the least.
For this week’s Crossroads podcast, we talked a bit about media coverage of the group claiming the rapture is looming, as well as that surprisingly sad story about former governor Jim McGreevey and the abominable coverage of a Mass intention for Osama bin Laden. Host Todd Wilken threw me by asking for my thoughts about Matt Drudge. I defended news aggregators but cautioned that news consumers must be more cautious and skeptical while reading links.
The Templeton Foundation gave its annual million-Euro prize this week, and The Guardian‘s science correspondent Ian Sample focused on the religion and science combo more than anything else, even though its recipient says “I’ve got no religious beliefs at all.”
The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating feature from Afghanistan last September headlined “A Chaplain and an Atheist Go to War.” The top of the story:
